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Someone once gave me the CDs (about eight hours worth) of Jane Fonda’s autobiography My Life So Far ,and a few weeks ago I began to listen to them in the car. I’d never tried any books on tape before.My friends Carol and Cy who take a lot of road trips do this all the time – and they listen to geographically appropriate authors. Tony Hillerman as they drive through New Mexico, Willa Cather in Nebraska etc.I never thought I wanted to do this until listening to Jane.

Okay, maybe the drive up into the mountains hearing about her Viet Nam days seemed to go on forever (though anyone still mad at her about Viet Nam should really read/listen to her side of it), but then there's all the juicy Ted Turner stuff, and also some really good insights about love and marriage. The thing that surprises me the most is that I look forward to getting in the car and hearing what Jane is up to in her life and in her emotional journey, which she's divided into three acts.She’s become my traveling companion.

Driving to the gym at 6:00 this morning in the dark with Jane, now into the third act of her life, I thought I’m going to use this in class sometime. In personal non-fiction I’m going to come up with an exercise about this.

Think about your life in acts - which act are you in? And would you write your life into three acts or four? And let us know if you listen to tapes or CD’s of books in your car –what are favorites?

Students ask me one question a lot: “How do I know when my essay/memoir/novel is finished?”And I always blithely quote someone who once said “A work of art is never finished, it’s abandoned.”Or some version of that. Usually there's the feeling you can do it better. Sometimes though you really do feel that it’s finished – you’ve had trusted friends (hopefully writers or at least avid book lovers) read it and give you feedback, you’ve rewritten and tried to deepen your characters and story, gone over and over the manuscriptto pare down to the necessary words and eliminated all frou frou, and finally you read it aloud to yourself to hear if the language worked. Then sometimes there does come this moment of thinking: yes, I’ve done my best. I’ve finished it.

Since this feeling can be fleeting, let me get it down in words right now cause I may not feel this way tomorrow. But as of today the novel-that-has-gone-on-forever is finished, now in shape to send to my agent (who has read a few other drafts of it and liked it, but this is the final draft she’ll read and hopefully send out).Actually this time, this version, has only taken three years and three months to the day to finish. (I’ve written other posts on the novel-that-goes-on-forever under “Lies & Truth in Fiction” which includes the fact that there are now people half way through college who were born around the time I began this novel in a different version). If I’m very lucky someone will want to publish it, then I’ll get an editor who will give me notes for rewritng the whole thing. But right now, December 17th, 2007, draft number 1,979 is finished.

And what I want you to know is that it’s finished in spite of the critic who sat on my shouldertelling me it wasn’t good enough, in spite of the fact that once I got so depressed reading a draft of it that I was going to take the manuscript to the beach and throw the pages in the Pacific Ocean, and in spite of the fact that there were days and weeks of not having a clue to where this damn story was going.I’m telling you all this depressing stuff in hopes that in some perverse way it’ll help you with your own writing. That you’ll grit your teeth and continue on with whatever it is you’re working on, that you won't listen to your critic or throw your pages out. And with the hope – even more important than publishing what you write – that you’ll get to the point where you know you finally wrote the story you’ve been hacking away at. For better or worse, you got it down on paper and finished it.

Again, I’m sharing my secret for the best holiday party ever and I hope as many of you as possible will copy the idea – if not this year then next.

Invite all your friends over for brunch, lunch or dinner and have them bring a book for a child in need. Have paper, scissors, and tape on hand for everyone to wrap the books, and put a Post-it on each book indicating what age it's for.I’ve been giving a Bring-a-Book Lunch for my girlfriends and students for the past seven years and it’s become a traditional holiday party at our house. Since I don’t have the time or inclination to cook, I just buy a lot of party size frozen lasagna, a ready to eat ham, fix lots of salad, and have plates of Trader Joe cookies for dessert. This year about fifty women came – some with whole boxes of books. All the books are going to an inner city school in LA (a school that doesn’t even have books for the classrooms, let alone each child owning his or her own book) and also to Ocean Park Community Center in Santa Monica.

As for the slightly sexist nature of this party, I took a vote the first year about whether to add guys and – what can I say? They wanted to keep it an all girl party. (And if I missed any of you who usually come to this, please let me know for next year. My address list is a mess.).

Here’s another way to help kids get books: Check out the website for the Bring Me A Book Foundation www.bringmeabook.org/ - This amazing organization serves kids who don’t have access to good books.

One more thing - We’re all got enough stuff, right? This year I’m giving my grandchildren shower heads and paint for Brad Pitt’s project for rebuilding the lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. Check this website out: www.makeitrightnola.org You can send them $10.00 or buy a whole house for $150,000.

A brief update on my last post: My husband is fine, but it turns out that Charlotte the cat is diabetic and I’m now giving her two shots of insulin a day. I’d love to hear from any of you who are going through this with your own cat or dog.

Always, always we were becoming a story.But I didn't understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story's life, would be what would allow me to live.

- Mark Doty

* *

A week of silence on this blog because of a number of things. First, I was clicking along nicely with my novel – that moment in your writing where you break through to another level and discover a whole lot of new stuff about your main character and what you’re actually writing about.The heavy lifting is done – the plot, the setting, most of the characters – and now you’re finding out what your story is really about. (I think this can happen no matter what you’re writing – a memoir, an essay, a poem or fiction.) In any event it’s one of the best parts of writing, and writing would be a whole lot more pleasant if you didn’t have to spend months or years to get to this point.

I’d like to end this post right here because it makes my life sound pretty much together- and don’t we all like to present the surface of our life as being organized and really under control. But if we’re writers it’s the chaos going on underneath that surface that we need to write about, need to be honest about. Sometimes the chaos is desperate, sometimes it’s hilariously funny (sometimes both)and sometimes it’s just chaos and you can’t figure it out until you write about it.But it’s all material, remember that.

As I was writing through my great epiphany in my novel, my husband called me in my office and said he was worried, he couldn’t write his name. His speech was also slurred. I raced down to his office (we both work at home) and he said maybe he slept on his arm the wrong way and he’d call the doctor in the morning. I got on the internet and read that his symptoms indicated a stroke and called 911. One fire truck, an ambulance, a paramedics van and eight guys (who qualify for sainthood) showed up. It did turn out to be a very mild stroke and he came home from the hospital yesterday. Which happened to be the day of the WriteGirl retreat, so there were fifty-seven wonderful women writers having a potluck lunch at our house when we got back home. Plus one of my daughters and her family stopping off on their way to her stepson’s wedding. (My son-in-law was thrilled with the unusual opportunity of eating such an amazing lunch at my house).

In the midst of this one of my cats, Charlotte, was having her own health issues, drinking a lot of water and crying. I have a writing student who’s a veterinarian (another person who qualifies for sainthood) and I called his office and he said to bring Charlotte right in.

Today Charlotte is doing better, my husband can use his right hand again and is absolutely fine, the WriteGirls left me with a refrigerator full of food, and I’m off to the family wedding in Ventura.My student the vet told me a hilarious story about his cat and his girlfriend that I told him I may steal if I can think of a way to fit it into my novel.